Detroit’s Civil War camp site discovered
Efforts underway to reveal hidden history
A team of University of Michigan archaeology researchers, historians and a private firm have located the historic site of Camp Ward, where 1,000 Detroit “freedom fighters” trained in the 102nd United States Colored Infantry before joining 209,000 Black troops to help defeat the Confederate forces in the Civil War.
Bunche Preparatory Academy and the adjacent Campau Park in Detroit’s historic Black Bottom neighborhood now reside where the six barracks of Camp Ward once stood, recognized only by a plaque on the school’s property honoring the “First Michigan Colored Regiment.”
Throughout the 19th century, Detroit was last stop in Underground Railroad before slaves escaped to Canada, so a blooming Black community began to grow in the city as early as the 1830s.
After President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, hundreds of thousands of Black men rushed forward to join the Union army, bringing men from Detroit, South Michigan and Canada together to not only fight for an end to slavery but to liberate their families who were still enslaved.
“There were a bunch of men who wanted to fight back against the masters who had done things like beat them and rape their wives,” Dale Rich, a Black Civil War historian on the project, told Bridge Detroit. “They wanted to get rid of those evil folks who would continue to mistreat their families if they didn’t fight. They saved America.”
The soldiers formed a solid infantry division with artillery and calvary units before shipping off to Annapolis on March 28, 1864. They beat back Confederate troops in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for the next year until the South surrendered and the troops were forced to return home.
Back in Detroit, Black Bottom, where the Camp Ward barracks once stood, grew into the city’s epicenter of African American culture, until the neighborhood was demolished in a racially-motivated redevelopment project in the 1960s, burying Camp Ward under decades upon decades worth of debris.
But over a three-day period back in August 2023, Tim Horsley, a Chicago-based archeological geophysicist, conducted a non-invasive scan of Campau Park to help reveal some of the long-lost streets and structures in Black Bottom.
Combined with historic maps from the Civil War era, the archaeological team is using the scans to locate more evidence of Camp Ward and thereby shed light on the forgotten African American history and its significance to Detroit.
If they can get permission to perform further scans on private property around Campau Park, identify remains and find financial support, then the team will excavate the ground in search of the Camp Ward barracks, Nubia Wardford Polk, an archaeologist who has been leading the project and is a member of the Michigan Underground Railroad Exploratory Collective (MUREC), told Bridge Detroit.